City of Possibilities
by Jane Williams
Interactive Press
Carindale, Queensland,
Australia
Copyright © 2011 by
Jane Williams
ISBN 9781921869105
73 pages, softbound, no
price given
Review by Zvi A.
Sesling
The best way to explain the
poetry of Jane Williams is to
present On
entering the city of possibilities:
Cry a little. People expect
it. It will show you are happy
to be there.
Reach out; touch all you can
before it’s frowned upon,
before you are accused of
appropriation
(any imprint you leave will
have some historical value).
Learn the language. Learn how
to speak it with your eyes,
with your hands. Lose your
accent incrementally –
too slow and you’re not
trying hard enough,
too fast and who do you think
you are?
Experiment with suspension of
disbelief as if
any city could be city of
possibilities.
Don’t forget to breathe.
Sear for meaning. Briefly.
It’s not worth the grief.
Turn your longing for
something more into art,
into the opposite of neutral
territory.
Fall apart. Pull yourself
together. Fall apart. Don’t make
a habit of it.
Break all the rules but not
all at once.
Remember you are just
visiting. Try not to get too attached.
When you’re ready, come
home. I’ve left a light burning
in the ruins.
The poem sums up a life
or a divorce. A child gone off to live with someone or maybe just a
temporary separation. It could be a poem of self-blame or a poem of
realization or
even a memoir like tale.
Then there is Portal,
a poem of which most people have probably experienced at one time or
another:
A day in bed scribbling and
surfing the net, looking out
through six panes of
dirt-flecked glass. Like my mother I
need a window to wake
to. The day is cloud-heavy but the
sun doles itself out in
intense bursts, highlighting the blood
red roof of the house
opposite. In the distance the rhythmic
thwack of our neighbour’s
axe splitting firewood. Closer to
home a child’s
superior weekend whine – insistent, defiant,
so sure of its place in the
world. That was me I think,
decades ago, looking at the
same sky, calling myself into
being.
googling my name still I
can’t find myself
There are many more
insightful, revealing and ultimately truth poems in this volume of
poetry by Jane Williams, her fourth collection. She has received
numerous awards in both Australia and New Zealand, where she now
resides.
Many of the poems have
first lines that seem to bear no relation to the title, for example:
Introduction to origami
The passenger from bus 42
reads like a who’s who
of the wrong side of
town.
Living things
in a mood so absent
it could have been
the subject
of a post modern
still-life painting…
Levels of incapacity
it seems only yesterday
he was free loving his way
around a world open to
suggestion his suggestion
I found this book
interesting not only because it is from “down under” but because
it does not have the pretentiousness that many American poets seem to
have. It is also a thinking person’s read.
__________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Reviewer for Boston
Small Press and Poetry Scene
Author, King
of the Jungle and
Across Stones of Bad Dreams
Editor, Muddy
River Poetry Review
Editor,
Bagel Bards Anthology 7
Editor,
Bagel Bards Anthology 8
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